every artist is a cannibal, every poet a thief
by call me milady
Summary: "So, good Maestro," he smiles, languid and contemptuous. "How much for a portrait?"
1. a beginning written in oil

_one; a beginning written in oil._

"Am I in a Roman chapel? Or have I somehow stepped foot in Padua, Seville, or Marseilles?" were the first words of the supposed appraisal, spoken by the young noble as he runs a tanned hand through his deep brown hair. "Going by your display here I would never have guessed that you are a painter from Holland, Maestro. Let alone an apprentice of Schoonmaker, the master of the Dordrecht altarpiece. Why, I am in a room of idols!" he laughed at his own joke. Niels Johanssen, the would-be maestro being addressed, merely blinked.

"...Thank you, sir." he said blandly.

Grinning, the noble gestured to the paintings of saints on display — Madonnas draped in blue and scarlet, the infant Christ as chubby as a Dutch baby raised on cheese. "Is there a purpose to all this painted beauty?" he asked, challenging and curious at once.

_food on the table_, Niels thought involuntarily. _a stocked kitchen, a sister's future dowry, a need to no longer see the ribs of one's youngest brother peeking from a tattered shirt._

"The true consequence of beauty is devotion, sir — which, unfortunately for my career, is no longer much sanctioned in my homeland." Indeed, the holy subjects of his paintings would be frowned upon even in Haarlem, or Rotterdam; where secret chapels nestle amid market fairs and papist presence is tolerated, but never embraced.

"Shame," was the succinct reply, the tone all but proclaiming the nobleman didn't find Niels' predicament a shame at all. He continued his examination of the paintings — Annunciations and Lamentations and Nativities, Saints Basil and Stephen and John the Baptist — works finished and unfinished alike. He skimmed through scraps of paper — scratched with silvery ink, studies in form — pinned to the edges of panels.

He stopped before a small, sepia portrait; and Niels clenched his jaw.

"And who is this?" he crowed, delighted. "Saint Alicia, or perhaps Saint Lucy? Do you not fear being dashed into _infierno_ when you paint into sanctified scenes of a saintess' life the face of a woman you love? Do not attempt to deny it; the care that went into the details, here — it tells me all. Such _sprezzatura_! And look how you capture the way her hair curls, here! Ah, Maestro, such is a painter's life for you, yes?" he exhaled. "In this, I envy you."

Niels almost rolled his eyes. Were all nobles of Aragón so needlessly theatrical? "It is nothing so sacred. It's merely a study in form, of my sister."

The reply seemed to startle his patron. "Your sister?" he looked back and forth between artisan and artwork. "...Mercy." he finally said, the word whooshing out like a breath.

"Quite," Niels replied after a while, his tone flat and noncommittal. He moved closer to the portrait. "One can hardly attend to the flowers I painted, here; mere daisies and columbines and the commonest of weeds. But my sister is clever, as much she is blessed with a comely visage. Our childhood in the Spanish Netherlands have allowed us — her, more than I — to understand the languages spoken in the villages at Leie's banks and the markets of Pamplona, aside from our own mother tongue. Who can know how God chooses to work His way in this world, yes?"

The words spilled out before he registered it, and Niels felt mildly embarrassed at how preening they sounded. His patron, though, seemed to not have noticed.

The painting was of a young woman — youthful and approximately of marriageable age, maybe a little bit more — sitting with meadow-plucked blossoms crowding in her hands and falling into her lap. Her brother had drawn her half-obscured, utilizing techniques of _chiaroscuro_ in imitation of — surpassing, perhaps — da Vinci and Rembrandt. A shaft of light, he painted, had caught her profile — her starched collar, her cheek smudged with a bit of fruit compote, hair falling in gentle waves, the color of winter wheat. Her eyes, downcast, were the color of old, green-gray enamel that one might see in a chapel ornament. Its shine worn off, depthless, as if they have been torn from the inside by little needles.

"Will that be all, sir?" Niels prompted.

The young nobleman did not answer him, choosing instead to tentatively place his fingertips upon the portrait. His digits casted small shadows on the canvas, and he looked upon the painting as a lion cub might have looked upon a fallen dove — closely, curiously, devoid of sympathy. A smidgeon of affection, perhaps, as a mad dog might be affectionate — rumbling with a desire to devour, the threat of sharp teeth ever-present under the surface.

Finally, he said, "Is this dry enough to move in a cart, you think?"

The painter started like a cat whose tail had been stepped on. "Are you not here to _look_ at my paintings, before deciding to commission me?"

But the look spared at him was sharp, and challenging. "I _am_, I assure you, but this is a very fine piece, and I like what I see. One mustn't fight the tides of change so, life need not be so hard and belligerent. There are fortunes to be made, a recovery from the war between my Spanish homeland and yours of Holland. One must not grasp with such lack of dignity at things better to be let go." Slowly, a smile blossomed — one that exuded not cheer and goodwill, but conceit and pride. "You disagree with me, Maestro?"

"I do not."

"Good. Bring the painting to my house, tomorrow, if the weather be pleasant. Yes," said the young Spaniard. "Bring the painting, and bring your sister as well."

There was a pause. "...Why?" Niels asked warily. "Do you mean to assess my skills by mounting both subject and portrait on a stage, side by side? Because if so, sir—"

"If so, _what_, exactly," he turned to face him. "_Would_ you do about it, good Maestro?" At the lack of a reply, the young noble sighed, as if greatly put-upon. "My reasons are my own, and it is nothing dishonorable. Decide and answer me. It is no tragedy for me if you decline. I'm sure that there are some of your colleagues more willing to concede to my generous offer." He looked down at the coin-purse tied at his waist meaningfully. "See, it's really quite simple. Tell me: yes, or no."

The effort needed to refrain from throwing this man out of his house, Niels thought, felt _extraordinary_. "Your name, then, before I graciously..." Here the nobleman's brows lifted — incredulous, comical, _mocking_. "...accept your offer."

He laughed, a hand trailing down the portrait of Niels' sister. "Antonio Fernández."

.

"And why does this 'Antonio Fernández' want me to go with you, brother?"

"Do you think I wouldn't refuse him, if I knew?" Niels said. "Damn it, I was tempted to refuse him even from the moment he opened his mouth. All I know is what he told me, and it is this: 'As long as you're coming, allow your gracious sister to come with you, well-scrubbed and courteous, and we'll see what happens. It may solve a domestic problem of mine.'"

The sister in question let out a humorless laugh.

"So _that's_ what he wants," she said. "What every man does. I didn't think it was possible for one to instantly grow such an appetite from seeing a mere sketch of yours, of me. Fully-clothed, too, and not the nude figures you draw for practicing anatomy." She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "And it's as if this town has a shortage of brothels. Or perhaps it's how it's done in Aragón? Perhaps it's how it's done among the nobility? If so, I mustn't allow you to draw me anymore, brother; lest another unsuspecting patron looking to commission you decide it better to fuck me, instead." Her voice had an edge, then, and became dangerously close to brittle; but she swallowed and forced it down.

"What nonsense you speak," Niels replied, in a tone more forceful than he intended. "Who else do I have willing to stand as a subject of my paintings, allowing me to practice my craft? Should I draw Lucas, maybe, as he is bent over his desk and up to his armpits in the Holy Scriptures? No," he shook his blond head. "No, Lucas's form is terrible, his face even more so."

Bel swatted at him. "Hush, now. Our little brother is working very hard on his studies at the abbey. Besides, what better future can we wish for him than to be betrothed to God? He is content there, and," she exhaled. "We must be content in knowing that he will not starve."

"Such temporal and morbid thoughts that escape from your lips, sister," Niels said, but he did not disagree.

"Well, 'Man doth not live by bread alone.'" his sister quoted duly. "Sometimes I think that the prophets, holy as they are, have never experienced a harsh, Friesland winter. Else they would have extolled other virtues for one to aspire to. Would poverty still be one of them, I wonder?"

She looked at the stalls of the _grotemarkt _they are passing. Then she looked at her own dress, the neatest one she owned. One of her hands curling the worn, pale-pink fabric upon her thigh.

"...Would chastity?" she asked, almost inaudible.

"I don't know," her brother answered. He took her hand, matching his steps to hers as they stride along the lane to the better district, to the abode of the nobleman from enemy lands of Spain. It was a long while before he spoke again, more quietly, "Forgive me, sis."

"Oh, brother mine." she said simply, but nothing more.

.

The siblings reached the home of their would-be patron — a house spacious enough, reserved enough, to accommodate its' inhabitant who bore the thrice-diluted blood of the extinct Trastámara. The broad-shouldered home had a walled garden beside it. In plum-red brick interrupted by gray lateral stones, the house loomed up two full stories, with a step gable pinching two abbreviated attics. At this late morning hour the sunlight slashed harshly at the front of the house, the windows facing the marketplace like panels of muggy water. The building looked august and — what was it — cautious? Like a house of secrets, Bel thought dimly. Like a cage of smoke.

Her brother rapped briskly at the door.

"Yes, yes, but come in," a muffled voice greeted them, sounding smarted and busy. "I'll send a servant around to help you carry your work, your study of form. Hopefully it won't be knocked in transport."

Bel remembered her face being painted upon the canvas, eyes downcast like the beatific gaze of the Virgin Mary, and thought: _oh, be knocked in transport._

"Let yourselves in now, that's it. Don't waste my time. Step right in. Are you well, today?" The question was asked with doubtful sincerity, yet another falsehood embedded within the manners of nobility.

Her brother's patron, this Sir Antonio, bit at the corner of his mouth, his lip faintly glossed with new gentle hairs. A tender start of stubble adorned his chin, and he possessed none of the stoutness that proved the success of greater, older men. Despite herself, Bel felt a small yen to stroke at the early, barely-visible mustache with her fingers, the way she liked to stroke the ears of the cat — at first a stray, now slightly fattened by the care showered from the Johanssen's meager kitchen — when it sat at the sunlight of a doorway.

"This is your sister, then, Maestro?" he asked, voice low, as he stepped forward to meet her eye, twisting his hand upward in a courtly, welcoming manner. "Such loveliness hidden in the homely Low Countries — who would've thought it? Indeed, she is beautiful."

"She is," Niels agreed. Whether it was to the Aragonese's rhetorical question of her identity, or to his remark of her supposedly pleasing features, Bel did not dare to guess.

"You are too kind, sir," she said instead.

"Is this modesty I witness?" said Antonio. "A virtue praised by the Saint Francesco, and by myself. Such an appealing trait! Oh, you are a rare one, my dear. A shame that your brother failed to fully capture all of your exquisite facets in the portrait of you he has shown me. Let's hope that he learns from his mistakes and does _my _portrait justice."

Niels looked up, protesting and dour. "...Sir, I've barely begun."

"And now you know the expectations I place upon you and your invaluable talent, Maestro. Shall we begin?" Antonio offered, as he began leading them through the salon. "I hope you are content in sitting the presence of gentlemen as we discuss business? And I am not wrong to infer that your brother is agreeable to my offer?"

"We have not yet," Niels said deliberately. "Discussed the matter of my payment."

"It is only money, Maestro," Antonio sighed, plucking a peach from a rounded, polished bowl; then biting into it. "And are you not an artist in need of money? If not, there are others in the Guild of Saint Luke who are eager for work. Master Rubens, after all, owes my family a favor. Or perhaps van Rijn of Amsterdam? His flesh-tones are superior to yours, I think. After all, I have bought the portrait of your lovely sister to hang here upon my walls. Why _should_ I grace you doubly with my patronage, when only by purchasing one work of yours, I have secured that you survive the coming winter?"

Bel watched as a drop of juice ran carelessly from the corner of his mouth down his jaw.

"And was that not the purpose of you asking me to bring my sister here? What has she meant in this negotiation?" replied Niels, bristling. "I'd thought that you might judge my skills by comparing the model and what I have done with her. I'd thought," the young Dutch artisan glanced at his sibling, who had gone as silent as a grave. "That by seeing for yourself, you all but approved of my work—"

"Oh, yes," said Antonio. "Well, your sister. It is no serious matter. You know, good Maestro, that should I commission you, you are to lodge here, in my house? In the interest of practicality, of course. I cannot drop by your studio daily — not when I have plans of my own that necessitates me always remaining within the vicinity of my property. Nor can you be expected to ship your materials to and fro, from your studio to this salon. Your sister is your only family, yes? And so, if I am to have you both living under my roof, so must you both be under my employ," He paused to sit down. "And you will be well-paid."

"But," Bel said. "What services might you require of _me_, sir?"

When he was at the Johanssen home, Antonio had side-stepped. He hesitated over placing his hand on a table made of cheap wood, and all but wrinkled his nose at the sight of cramped quarters. Here, in his own halls — where well-carved cupboards and oiled chairs stood against walls of patterned Turkish fabric — he slumped luxuriously, yawned and stretched in the sun.

The answering smile he gave her, like everything else about him, was languid, devilish, and bold.

.

There was much to fear, Bel learned, in the sun-splashed house of Fernández; but at the same time there was much to admire. For instance: a bowl sitting on a polished table — from the Orient, she had been told. Upon the surface of the bowl, deepest in, a lace of purple-gray hairline fractures, then covered by an eggshell wash, through which blue painted lines formed blowsy chrysanthemum blossoms. The flowers were suspended in some thin distance of — for lack of a better word — shine. Inside the curve of the bowl, a reflection: a distorted image of herself. Too blurred to be perceived as beauteous, or ugly.

At the end of the hall, her brother kept his room pristine, almost spartan; even as his occupation inevitably demanded that his workplace — his makeshift studio, seemingly out of place in a home decorated ostentatiously by trinkets made of Peruvian silver and Cuban gold — was to be sloppy and discomposed. She saw him step out of the kitchens, a steaming mug of _boerenkoffie _in his artist hands, and smiled at the sight of him. Her dearest Niels — contemplative, taciturn, stoic. Distant.

But the sound of a dropped or thrown plate crashing on the floor, followed by a yelp, brought her attention back to the subject placed under her care.

"Now, Lovino," she sighed loudly. "Lovino," she called again, biting her lip. Where did he go? It was her job, now, to befriend the temperamental, hot-headed child; to gain his trust, to teach him the languages of Europe.

The boy, just shy of a dozen years, was a relative of Antonio's; sent to be fostered and familiarized with the career of a soldier and the etiquettes of noblemen. Though a common great-great-uncle bound them by blood, little Lovino's Spanish heritage had all but disappeared compared to his Aragonese cousin — Lovino's forefathers had intermarried with the great Roman families and had sired progenies that were scattered throughout the southern parts of the Italian peninsula, from the Papal States to the Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily. Indeed, Lovino was arguably more Pallavicini, or di Calabria, than Spanish Borgoña.

But the family name attached to the boy's christian one was Vargas, and the grin that his Fernández cousin afforded her was apologetic, if brief. "He is an unusual child, and as family, I am patient with his strange ways," he confided. "You too, must be patient."

Bel shook her head. "No, he is merely sulking because I teased him earlier, about not having yet bathed even when the morning sun is already so high in the sky. Normally he is a wonderful boy, very personable," She looked to the side with mirthful eyes. "Very...ah, charming."

Antonio's eyebrows rose, seeming to be pleasantly surprised at the notion that his whirlwind of a baby cousin, bad-tempered and bellicose, had just been described as 'charming.'

"Oh, is he? This is news to me!" he said.

"Mmm," she hummed. "Most wonderful manners he has. He offers me compliments daily, with a face pinched red with pleasure — so red, it looks like he might explode! He seems pleased to have me as a tutor, and he is enthusiastic in learning the words I teach him," she considered. "Well, one, at least."

"And that is?"

"How to request a favor, from a lady. Specifically, a kiss," she said, laughter bubbling at the thought. "Whomever little Lovino is destined to marry would be very happy, to have such an affectionate, adorable spouse."

Antonio grinned. "And until then, all of his precocious affections are directed towards you."

"I am very lucky," she agreed, only half-joking. Her hand was pressed upon her breast in imitation of a demure housewife. "Now if only I can find him, if only he was more inclined to learn proper words that did _not_ have anything to do with wanting someone to kiss him—" At this, a lidded, furtive glance was spared at her lips, though it went unnoticed. "—and if only he wasn't so _moody_, I would feel even luckier to have him under my care. Lovino? Lovino, my love? It's almost past eleven, and time to review your lessons. Oh, I _do _hope you have decided to have a bath, by now."

She stalked off down the halls then, intent on catching his little cousin and resuming her instructions. Antonio's gaze trailed after her long after she left.

.

He had read the story of his namesake a great many times, seen it printed in a thousand little lithographs half the size of his palm — Saint Anthony of Constantinople, canonized in starved bones and hushed prayers — and yet to have one's chambers christened in allegory was now seen as unbecoming. Modernity demanded that the hall of saints that used to grace a respectable home, must be replaced by images of one's self. How Dutch it was, how Flemish, he mused; his thoughts betraying his Spanish blood. To celebrate one's own form instead that of the hallowed _santos_ — how preening, how presumptuous! Such an act of self-love, as though man was god himself.

He exhaled. _then again_, he thought. _imago dei_.

Johanssen had been taking sketches of his face for weeks, now, but this is the first time that Antonio had stood for him. It felt strange, to remain so still while in so familiar fabric, sporting a cape with a generous cut and a cap atop his head. A lace collar settled upon his throat like the fingers of a lover, cradling his dark, handsome countenance. He was statue-struck and paralyzed — _paralyzing_, he should think — in the light that the maestro so approved of.

"Now don't move," the Dutchman muttered, pinched face slowly smoothing as he daubed brush in tempera, rich red and gold. "You must look that way, sir. Look up."

He looked up. He lifted his gaze to the sky and imagined the Holy Ghost staring down on him in return. After all, was not God in the height of Heaven?

"It looks good, Maestro."

Antonio whirled around. "I didn't know you'd be about," he declared, more than a little pleased. "What a pleasant surprise."

The Maestro said nothing, but acknowledged his sister's presence and praise with the barest hint of a smile. "Pleasant indeed."

"Little Lovino has shunned me for the day," she reported self-pityingly. "The lesson to be learned, I suppose, is that my lord's cousin doesn't take well to jokes about his hygiene."

Antonio resumed the pose he struck for the Maestro, even as he chuckled. "I apologize deeply for his poor behavior, then."

"Please, sir, there is no need," she said. "I'm sure he would return to being his well-behaved self by dinnertime, and once again showering me with the loveliest compliments, proclaiming my supposed beauty—" she laughed, and turned to leave. "—but, given my words and how it is now hurting his poor, tender feelings; the boy's sweet words will be entirely undeserved."

"Nonsense!" Antonio whirled again, stopping Bel in her tracks and making Niels groan. "You deserve _every_ compliment on your beauty, _cariño_, and believe me, I should know. I've seen most of the known world. Dreamless Calvinists of your home Holland, wanting flowers — flowers! — for commerce; bulbous things shaped like onions! Beauty to sell as if it had its own sake. Why, I've set foot in the old castles of Granada, whose rulers used to follow the examples of the Mohammedans in Constantinople — they all rebuke the notion of portraying divinity in anything but Euclidean tiles of blue and gold!"

"I'm drawing your mouth, sir. _Close_ it," Niels gritted. "If you _please_."

Antonio paid him no mind. "So then," he attempted, flashing a look at the painter's fair sister, who remained hovering uncertainly at her brother's back. "Do you often serve as our maestro's muse?"

She blinked at him. "You must speak plainly with me, sir, I am but a poor peasant girl."

"Well, hopefully one of those qualities can be remedied by my patronage," he replied, flippant.

"Your _mouth_, sir," Niels interrupted tartly. Then, he addressed his sister. "A muse, sis, is a spirit from the ancient Hellenic religion, a goddess who visits a man embarked upon a creative task, and inspires him."

She laughed. "You think me a goddess, then?"

"And why should we not?" the Aragonese was the one to answer her, with a wide roguish grin. His intentions — filthy as they were, and so unabashedly direct — looked so blatant in Niels' eyes that he almost snapped his brush in half. "I don't hold with goddesses from old pagan religions, but I know the love of those stories has swept painter and patron alike. The Florentines are as like to show us the transformation of Io, the seduction of Europa, the judgment of Paris; as they are to show us Christ and the Virgin, Saints Sebastian and John the Evangelist."

The young noble puffed, helplessness and haughtiness intermingled. "I, for one, do not approve. I say that artists that cater to such requests are only stroking their own vanity."

Niels stopped his brushstrokes, and then deliberately set the tools down. Thinking that a signal of the session's end, Antonio stretched away the tension and stiffness of remaining still for so long — oblivious to the condescension in the young Maestro's pointed actions, or perhaps simply ignoring it. Bel eyed her brother worriedly as he tidied up his belongings, contempt for the Spaniard barely hidden behind a thin veil of professional civility.

"And I say, commerce is commerce. And if a Florentine patron wants from me an image of Venus, then I paint the Mother of God and call her Venus."

Antonio's jaw dropped open as Niels reached the door. "For shame!" he cried; aghast, offended, scandalized.

Bel, too, couldn't help but bristle at this. Propriety be damned. "We eat," she said simply, sharply.

"I'd rather go hungry." The moral superiority of the well-fed.

Bel looked at him for a long time, before following after her brother. "No," she finally said. "You wouldn't."

.

When she saw him again later that evening, in a tiny little chamber meant for solitary reading and meditation, she was almost tempted to avoid him, given the sour exchange of words in the salon.

(He was a nobleman, blessed with blue-blood since his birth, and no doubt never had the misfortune of enduring the gusts of wind billowing through old, patched walls. He must know nothing of poverty, of searching through scraps in hopes of finding stale bread and hard cheese, of approaching brothels and nunneries alike to be able to provide for one's family. Any arrogant actions he displayed, any brutal frankness, must only be the result of well-meaning obliviousness, cultivated by a sheltered Catholic upbringing.)

But his eyes were quicker than her reflexes, and so Bel found herself pinned down by her employer's gaze as he walked purposefully towards her. She averted her eyes, only for them to land on his most recent purchase, a familiar image of a Young Woman with Wildflowers.

"Look at you. Are you admiring your own portrait?" he said. "Are you taking after Narcissus, now?"

Her head titled questioningly, almost birdlike. "Narcissus, sir?"

"What, you don't know Narcissus?"

_yes_, she thought, trying to keep her temper in check. well-meaning_ obliviousness, cultivated by a _very_ sheltered upbringing._ "I know my letters, but only barely. Only what my father taught me, and from my younger brother, who is studying for the priesthood."

Her father had been a lowly foot-soldier turned equally-lowly provincial officer. A stolid, sober _burgher_; knowing just enough of reading and writing to get by, and her mother the daughter of a stonemason. She counted it a blessing that what little trickle of artistic inclination their family had — learnt from studying sculptures as well as architectural measurements — went to Niels; while the predilection for thick books and looming ledgers went to Lucas.

And she, the middle-child and only daughter, must make do with what she had. What all women had, Bel thought, as she looked upon her own portrait hanging there, on the wall.

"Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection, in the waters of a spring," Antonio explained. Then, suddenly, he asked, "Do you not enjoy being the muse of your brother's paintings, _cariño_?"

Bel smiled, though it did not reach her eyes. "It is flattering, and of course I want to help my dear brother hone his art in whatever way I can, but — he wants to draw a marble statue. Not a person." _not a sister_, she supplied in her mind. _not me_.

Antonio looked at her, his cheekbones stark in the low light.

Bel lifted her head. "And so, I become marble. I become bronze, and glass, and oak. I become whatever he needs me to be, or else," she shrugged. "We starve." This she says so matter-of-factly that Antonio couldn't help but be taken aback.

"He wants a beauty. He wants a saint, a Madonna, an angel in glory. That's what all the world wants. And they are saddled with a hound. So I become beauty, too," she said, soft and wistful. "I make-believe it."

She had dark, sad eyes; he noticed. And though she toiled underneath sunlight filtered through windows, her skin remained deceptively lily-white. He thought back to when he first caught sight of her portrait, and did not blame her brother's desire to capture her features, nor himself for mistaking it as an image of a martyred virgin. Melancholic, sacrosanct, and world-weary.

"If you are to pose as the Madonna," he snatched a cloth of black fabric, seemingly out of thin air. "You must first be veiled."

The way he placed the small cloth upon her head did not match his playful tone — gentle, almost reverent. He tugged at the folds to partly cover her face, and then softly swept it aside so that it framed her better, while the skin at his knuckles brushed her cheek. Their faces were close, almost indecently so, and Bel appraised him with an amateur artist's eye the way her brother had inadvertently taught her. She judged proportions: the length of his lashes, shape of his nose, the curve of his jaw. Most of all, she looked into his eyes — serene, almost disconcertingly angelic, and darkened with something she dared not name.

She thought of the saint Catherine, blonde and chaste and virtuous, married to God Himself. Then she thought of gods, fierce and jealous, king of the heavens disguised as a bull. Kidnapping maidens, and then doing what bulls were well known to do.

"Is this the purpose of you sending for me?" she asked, her heart beating brave blood in a trapped body. "To tend to your cousin, and to dress me in lace?"

"This is the Spanish way," he told her. "In the courts of Aragón, they don't wear ruffs that the ladies of the Low Countries do. Instead, they drape their heads with _mantillas_, like so. I think it is a good style," he said. "For a face hidden, be it young or old, beautiful or ugly, can't be a masque of iniquity. To cover one's features, even barely, serves to make one seem humble in one's beauty."

Her words turned low and smoky. "And am I beautiful, sir?"

He exhaled, and said in a voice only loud enough to carry between the two of them, "The most I've ever yet seen."

.

.

.

_tbc._


	2. something better than paradise

_two; something better than paradise._

The courtyards have always been Antonio's favorite place in his estate. He never ceased to admire the workmanship that went into its' building, the precision of its' architecture. He liked how the back of the house opened out onto a sizable lot, bricked and gated, ending in iron gates always locked. To one side was a kitchen yard, for washing and preparing food, for the growth of herbs and vegetables (small tomato vines seemed to have dominated most of the patches.) To the other side, opening off to the salon, a small garden, Italianate in design.

He saw a figure pad down the pebbled paths and orderly foliage, her head more golden than Croesus's treasure. A cat, nearly lemon-yellow, followed.

He shot out an arm to grab at her waist, and another to muffle her surprised scream.

"Sir!" Bel hissed, when she managed to comport herself. "What on God's earth—?"

He hushed her. "Please, not so loud!" he said. "I'm hiding."

She looked as if she didn't know whether to laugh or scold. "Then why am I—?"

He huddled, inadvertently pressing them both to the corners of the walls so that the falling shadows might hide them. His grin, like a tomcat making an acquaintance of a baby bird, seemed to be wider when half-obscured. "I thought I could use some company."

She almost scoffed at how ridiculous it sounded. Still, her voice obligingly dropped down to a whisper. "And what are we hiding from?"

"_Cousin_!" a voice bellowed, cracking hilariously due to puberty — giving away the obvious identity of Antonio's pursuer. "Cousin, come back here, damn you; so I can _split _open your _skull_!"

"Such a chaotic child!" Bel gasped. She knew of Lovino's temper, but on the rare occasion that the boy got angry at her, he merely sulked, or pouted. It was easy enough for her to coax him back into good manners. He certainly didn't shout death-threats that rang through the halls, loud enough for the entire town to hear. "He reminds me of the story of the Minotaur that he recited to me, a few days ago. If only he could see himself now! Thundering like a storm, snorting like a bull."

Antonio paused. "Like a bull..." he mused.

All of a sudden, he let out one loud, sharp whistle, startling her.

"Sir, what—?"

Just as quickly, Antonio jerked himself out of the shadows. His hand shot up, palm facing inwards, and he curved his fingers in a universal gesture of challenge. He grinned when he saw the flushed, furious face of his baby cousin; glaring down at him from across the gardens.

"_Olé_," he said simply.

"Antonio, you son of a whore!" Lovino cried, fury half-gone and replaced by a kind of fondness, though still loud and irate and very, very _rude_. "Hiding, were you? Didn't you teach me that real men fight face-to-face?"

"Oh, you remembered?" Antonio crowed, delighted and mischievous both. "I thought such a lesson wouldn't manage to burrow in that thick head of yours! And look at you now, as red as a tomato! Come then, little _mocoso_, let us fight as men—!"

His sentence was interrupted as Lovino, now with all the mass and what little muscle he obtained as a growing boy, launched himself at his older cousin and tackled him to the ground.

Antonio let out a startled _whoof_, and fell backwards, landing hard on his rump. He sat there for a moment, stunned, a bruise starting to form on his tailbone, his hand cradling his stomach — the unfortunate target of Lovino's head-butt. Like a bull, indeed! He began laughing, a disbelieving, good-natured guffaw; _oh, little boy, little cousin of mine, you _dared_!_

Meanwhile, Lovino reached forward to set himself upright, knocking aside the hand Antonio offered. Prickling once again at the sound of his cousin's laughter, the boy launched himself forward, diving for the former's knees. They hit the ground hard, again, and soon they were rolling in the dirt, both trying to wrestle the other into submission, laughing in delight at the strength in their limbs. Their tussle ended up knocking over a poor potted plant as they rolled around the grassy courtyard. The squabble had turned affectionate, now, instead of an all-out brawl. Still, Antonio let out a pained groan as Lovino managed to push him off, causing his head to collide unceremoniously with the bark of an orange tree.

Lovino went running into Bel's arms, tucking himself safely away from retribution. Antonio frowned deeply when he saw this, and whined: _traitor_, _i thought you were on my side! _

At this, she couldn't help but laugh.

.

At late morning on another day, a voice sounded from the salon. Bel asked her brother to see who it was as she juggled many kitchen tasks at once. Niels, nursing a mug of hot milk, had made his response very clear in his frown.

"Please?" she said, and his well-made defense crumbled, as it was wont to do ever since they were children and his sister had positively perfected the art of pouting to get what she wanted.

The voice called again, and he said, "Just a moment," and went down to find Antonio lounging on a bench, his legs stretched out to the fire.

"Oh. Hello, sir." Niels said, barely enough to be polite to the man who was ostensibly paying for his daily bread.

Antonio chuckled lowly, as though Niels' pretense at supplication was greatly funny to him. Perhaps it was. "Hello. I believe I called for your sister, Maestro? Or do you answer to her name, now? Dear me, that would prove very troubling."

"She is currently indisposed," said Niels. "And thus you only have me at your service now, I'm afraid."

"So it would seem," Antonio agreed. "And it's just as well. I know you have yet to finish my portrait — God knows how long it is taking you to do it, really. But I would have you take the Young Woman with Wildflowers out and put it on display."

"Display? Where?"

"In the far shores of the New World. What do you mean, _where_? Here, obviously." Antonio harrumphed and placed a palm under his chin. Then, slightly more placating, he added, "You would receive much acclaim as the artist, of course."

"A generous offer, but I'm afraid we don't want to become even more indebted to you than we already are—"

"The fact that I phrased my words as I did is a mere courtesy, I think you should know by now. And the fact that I am now your patron should serve to show you how much I appreciate your work. It seems, Maestro," he said, not without a whiff of finality, as if speaking to a particularly young, particularly stupid child. "That the accepted way to showcase the art of a master one patronizes is for one to host a gathering, some time in the future, with the favored piece on display. And so if I must, I suppose I will."

Patronizing indeed. _my family has enough dignity to refuse to be your charity case_, is what Niels thought, even as he said, "You _suppose_, sir?"

"Oh, what is this now," said Antonio, casting him a look more amused than smug, a rare occurrence. "I think I detect that you would like this?"

"I think nothing," he replied, stoutly, then corrected himself, "Sir. Arrangements such as this are something men of your stock want. It is something neither I, nor my sister, I should think, yearn to do."

"And you forget, that men of my stock can pay for what we want, even when others fail to yearn for it." He smiled with all his teeth, reminding Niels of the mysterious string of tiny yet obviously pricey gems — Antwerp diamonds, he had guessed, not without distaste — that only had began to grace his sister's neck in the last few days.

"So you can see, I require your service."

"Require what you like," said Niels simply, leaving the room.

.

Still, his impertinent refusal did not mean the automatic cancellation of his commission, Niels was begrudgingly thankful to find out. And so he painted, as he was paid to do, and he painted well. He fussed over details, and constantly arranged and rearranged composition, crumpling up dissatisfactory sketches and throwing them over his shoulder. He corrected mistakes by wiping down the canvas with a rag that smelled of linseed oil. He capped his paints with meticulous precision, intent on saving up whatever colors he had. Yet it also felt as if he was both impatient with the portrait, as well as procrastinating. As though once it was finished, it would be a masterpiece, and nothing else he drew would ever again come close.

At times when Niels cursed the light for being fickle, which was practically daily, he had no qualms about stepping out of his patron's stately house. His sister followed, out of obligation, out of practicality, and out of worry. If this admittedly-smothering concern bothered him, he kept it to himself, as he did all things.

And so Bel stood by Niels as they waited at the door of the tobacconist, where her brother stopped to buy a pleasing blend for his modest pipe. She wondered at the possibility: if her brother were to paint himself, what would he notice?

There was the heavy brow, handsome yet slightly protruding, like a lump of bread-dough that has fallen forward from up top. Firmly marshaled eyebrows, knitted together in the act of watching the merchant cut the tobacco to the correct specifications. Niels' hand was soldered to his hip, a gesture of patience and intractability both. His mouth was a grim line. The lower lip was nipped in, to be pinched by the upper teeth in moments of mild distress. And, Bel realized, such moments were frequent.

Niels lived a life of compromise. He took nothing for granted and bartered every sentence to their family's advantage. How dear he was, even in his strictness, his chill.

When Bel tried to broach the subject of their employer to him, of Antonio's kindness, Niels' jaw had worked. He took a very long drag from his freshly-filled pipe.

"You must know, brother," she said. "That sir Antonio is—"

Finally, he scoffed. "Oh, again with your 'sir Antonio', isn't it, sis?" His tone was just short of mocking. "I don't know what kindness of his you are talking about. And you. What makes you think you could recognize a kindness if you saw one?"

"You are _insufferable_," she snapped in reply. "For all your splendor of realizing things in paint and canvas, brother, you are a cold man. You only want to see and to capture, and have no intentions of making anything better for anyone. You look at this—" she gestured angrily at her face, reminding him of the bloody portrait of her that started it all, "—and I must tell you that you chase the wrong beauty. I found that I had some chance and interesting a well-born match in myself, and you laugh and mock me for it."

"You mean you have some chance of interesting a hellish Spaniard—!" Niels cried, catching himself and sucking in a breath. "You are deluding yourself, even more so than usual. And to say that I've no intentions of bettering our future — who do you think I accepted the damned commission for?"

Guilt struck at her like a thunderous wave. Her brother was unhappy here, chafing under the thumb of her employer who had somehow wormed his way into becoming her — what were they? Lovers? Friends? She would laugh at the thought, the gems around her neck feeling as tight as a noose. No, he was more of a generous, if particularly demanding, employer; and nothing more, _nothing_ —

Discontent was a worm that burrowed deep, she knew. And when it burrowed, it bred.

"Damn it, sis," said Niels, hand threading his hair. "He is not the paragon of virtue you make him out to be."

"I know that," Bel said, meaning to sound apologetic but only ending up sounding arch. "Do you think me an idiot?"

"_Should_ I?" he challenged, coolly.

At the sight of this — her brother, riled-up and brooding, Bel's anger deflated as quickly as it came. She exhaled heavily; frustrated, forlorn. "It can't be helped. It's how he's been brought up. How all noblemen are," she shrugged. "All Spaniards."

"Spaniards are ruthlessness and brutality in rarefied form." Niels retorted. "And I'll bet you there is none in the entirety of Spain more swaggering and vainglorious than he. Yet in spite of that, you know how he acts all friendly on the surface, charms so blatantly superficial, while simultaneously flaunting everything he has. So it's even _more_ irksome. At times like this I wished I had half the courage of the first Prince of Orange to act like any good Dutchman should when facing an Aragonese."

He sighed, weariness incarnate, and Bel's hand found his shoulder on its own volition. She rubbed them sympathetically, all anger gone. "Christ," he swore, slumping into her touch. "The day when we finally are released from this damned bondage of being under his employ cannot come sooner, sis."

Her brother the young would-be Maestro looked an old man, or, Bel thought, like the old man he would become later in life. Was it merely the contrast with Antonio, proud and young and comely upon canvas? No. The portrait itself was making her brother old, for he was struggling, as if he would never have the courage again to try to love world in oil and varnish, canvas and light.

.

Lovino plopped onto a sitting pillow, legs splayed out before him and back braced against the smooth white of the walls, watching as Bel crouched down and gently ran her hands over a fresh batch of cut begonias, goblet-shaped and downy-soft. She checked the blooms' stems, felt their petals, and tugged with quiet playfulness at the tips. Lovino saw her nibble curiously at her bottom lip. The air smelled of fresh grass and clean sheets, and he inhaled deeply into his nose, taking it in. Sunlight streaming in through the large window caught the dust motes, wrapping her and the blooms in a swirl of golden light. It made it as if she was an angel touching ground for the first time, all for the sake of admiring some flowers.

Of course, Lovino knew that wasn't the case — preparation for his cousin Antonio's planned gathering demanded that the house be spruced and decorated and dusted and trimmed, even if the occasion wasn't until a few more months. Lovino also knew that he, unlike Bel, was far from being an angel himself; despite her coos at him.

What he was, though, was a disobedient child. A summer-born son, he had been steeped in Roman heat-waves, and raised on gilded fineries, blessed chants of _ave maria_s and _deo gratias_ and endless masses dusted in incense that succeeded in nothing but putting him to sleep. From the moment he could walk and speak, Lovino was a climbing, shouting, sneaking, willful boy; who was scooped up in pious arms and sternly admonished by turns, drawing out deep frowns and exasperated scolds all at once. His grandfather had proclaimed that his younger brother was the one destined for the cardinal's hat, then. And it was just as well. He would have one Vargas son in the cloth, and one in armor.

(one to be waited upon by the princes of holy mother church, and one sentenced to die upon the battlefield, nameless and unmourned.)

But his cousin Antonio's own household here up north seemed to hold no such thoughts. It indulged Lovino often, and was unabashedly fond of him; the littlest, youngest member. Despite his short temper and his as-of-now shorter height — he positively looked like an imp when standing next to the Maestro Johannsen, ridiculous ogre of a man that he was!

Even the Maestro, who saw most children as nothing more than a nuisance ('snotty little lying limbs of the devil,' he said, once, pointedly side-eyeing the red-faced Lovino coddled up in his sister's arms) — even he had sometimes carved faces into potatoes for no other purpose than to make Lovino snigger.

But the Maestro's sister, his makeshift tutor and caretaker, called upon him daily, in a sweet sing-song voice. Spoiled him silly, and called him her love.

(and he flushed, grateful enough to be anyone's.)

"Am I your love?" Lovino asked one day, precocious and wheedling.

Bel smiled and quieted him with pat on the cheek, kissed his little-boy lips as gently and chastely as a mother might. "I would dearly love you to be."

"Then, then—!" Breath puffed from the little boy's nostrils, betraying his excitement — he was growing, steadily, into his Italian blood. "Do you hate my cousin?"

"And why would you think that?"

He deflated. "You don't, then," he mumbled. "I am not your love, after all."

"Of course you are, sweet boy!" she cried. "But why would my love for you mean that I hated your good cousin?"

Lovino looked thoughtful, his brow furrowed as though he was pondering the mysteries of the world. For a moment, he seemed older than his age, and no longer the _bambino_ still playing at war with toy soldiers.

"I..." he started. He paused out of bashfulness, but seemed to overcome it just as quickly. "I demand your hand in marriage."

She couldn't help it, laughter spilled out of her lips before she realized. "Oh, Lovino, what is this talk?"

"I would make a good husband to you. I am great-great-nephew to Inquisition Judge de Vargas, I will have an income of forty thousand ducats a year and a post in the Neapolitan army. You know, if my uncle's Piccolomini half-brother was to die, I might become Duke of Amalfi. Antonio has less than I do. And so you ought to hate him, you _ought_ to." he said in earnest. Lovino looked at her, eyes pleading; and the innocence shining through it alarmed her.

As Bel digested his words, Lovino puffed and swore loudly. It was, she realized, a habit he had taken to in order to make himself seem older. "You ought to hate him," he repeated, though he sounded less sure. "After all, everyone else does. Don't you see?"

"I see I must tutor you more diligently in the use of words, my love. I will not have you speak so rudely while I am the one teaching you. Come, now — how does one say 'I am pleased to meet you,' in French?"

"My cousin is a bastard."

"I _will_ wash your mouth with soap if you keep speaking so wickedly, Lovino, don't think I won't."

"He is, my family says so!" Lovino cried, protesting. "Cousin Antonio is a child born of sin." he recited. "They call him misbegotten, they call him a disgrace. They tell me that he possesses many vices, and though they don't outweigh his virtues, the scale teeters precariously enough that the king himself was the one that demanded that he be sent away. I don't understand."

Bel fell silent.

Then he said, "Tell me again of sin," in a voice so small, so meek and so, so much like a boy still; and she knew he meant: _tell me what my cousin had done wrong, so that i may avoid it. so that i will not have to share his fate, living a life without grace and without honor. tell me, because i am frightened, though i don't know for whom._

.

The weeks of the following season felt endless. Mornings were locked in frosty winds and hints of fog. Too many days in a row the household was kept inside. Though Antonio teased one Johanssen sibling and taunted the other, he was pleased to have the company. But during the season when berries grew ripe for the picking, Lucas wrote that he was granted a much-needed leave from his abbey and his lowly _misdienaar_ duties (_although_, he wrote, always looking at the bright side. _lord willing, i think it won't be long before i finally become a predikant_!)

As a result, both Johanssen siblings became increasingly distracted, though in different ways. Bel was overjoyed, and Niels became impatient. When the weather lifted, they spent long days at their home, leaving the Fernández house behind.

Without Bel's vigilance about his education, Lovino grew bored.

"What is wrong with you, cousin?" he asked, during an odd summerlike day that felt misplaced in the middle of dreary December. Antonio was not accustomed to menial work, but Lovino had arbitrarily demanded a bath, and had splashed into the tub of hot water after flinging a soaked sponge unceremoniously at his older cousin, and so he obligingly scrubbed and poured as the boy dunked himself underwater. The water from the wash made Antonio's old, loose shirt cling to the curves of his chest, the stark of his collarbones. The marks of penance, pale and thin, he kept trussed and flat against the skin of his back with a length of linen.

"Do they hurt?" his cousin asked, peering at them.

_they do not hurt_, Antonio thought.

"You used to go on so many hunting trips back home, if I recall correctly. So are those trophies from back then too? Why haven't they healed?"

Antonio opened his mouth to say something, something about one trying to fit into spaces not made for them, and ending up breaking the mold. One whose smiles were more disarming than those of the noblest of their uncles, one whose straying eyes and wandering hands and prodigal ways had set the entire court of pious King Philip ablaze.

And how one had panicked, when the length of one's sins brushed the floor, too large to open in any room of one's godmother's house. Impossible to hide.

So it all became packed and sent away, to be atoned for (to be killed over) up in the unforgiving north. He couldn't exactly say that he had _tried_, but he did edge close enough to it, yet still his sins had remained. Even despite the skin of his wrists unblemished by stigmata, the vulnerable curve of his back scarred by penitence. The accidental humanities of him.

"Why do you ask so many questions?" Antonio said instead, but Lovino was already distracted by the sunlight on the water, and did not hear.

.

"You call me sir," Antonio began. "And it doesn't sit well with me."

Bel slid him a sideways glance. "Then what should I call you?"

"Couldn't you just call me Antonio?"

"I could not," she almost stammered.

"Oh, surely it mustn't be that hard?" he coaxed, joking. "If it helps, imagine the Maestro in my place. Speak to me like you speak to your brother."

Despite herself, her face broke into a smile. "Oh, that I certainly could not," she said. "You have no idea how I address my brother, sir. And trust me—" she laughed lightly, turning to leave. "You don't want that.

"Maybe I do," said Antonio, lightning-fast, expression shuttered by the darkening of his eyes. "But then again, who knows what we want? We're all mysteries, even to ourselves."

What mysteries he had been acquainted with, when he was a child in Aragón! The waggish tongues of the court ladies, the wallets of the noble stock slowly thinning as armies and navies suffered defeat again and again. His family, casting a troubled eye over him as well as their old abandoned estate that laid in soil just shy of the United Provinces. Constant talks of guldens and florins. A hand, rough and unlovely, handing him a letter bearing the royal seal. A property for him to manage, a relative to foster, an inheritance to keep within sights. These were grim and unyielding tasks, and though given supposedly out of familial love, he'd never known any to love the whole of what he was. So why should the bloodline that sired him be any different?

But approval was overrated, he had told himself firmly. Approval and disapproval alike satisfy those who deliver it more than those who receive it. He cared nothing for approval, and didn't mind going without it.

Instead, he reached out an arm, and planted a hand upon the wall — boxing Bel in. And she was caught, then, caged between his limbs, like a bird that had alighted on a windowsill, looking for crumbs. If he leaned in anymore than he did now, she would be pressed firmly against the walls; her ribs would all break and her life would fly out of her heart through her unstopped veins.

"Tell me," he said. "What do _you_ want?"

"...What could I want?" she questioned back. "I am a poor girl, sister of an unknown painter, dingier than dung. I, of the hardy common stock; I, with my arms like awls. I, a housemaid instead of a lady of leisure. I, ill-bred as an imp's droppings—"

"You, you, you, you," he interrupted. He was no longer grinning at her. His face was soaked in seriousness. "Stop this line of thought. To continue to demean yourself so, as if you're paying penance. As if you have fallen from God's grace." He moved closer until mere inches separated them. He studied her, as a small child would study a bug before squashing it with a stone.

The blowing wind rustled the trees in the gardens, and Bel watched as their shadows took shape; writhing upon the windows. Eyes narrowed, Antonio then said, "...What?"

He peered at her. "Do you not believe me?" There was an odd lack of tenderness in his words, but some refined brutality, some roguish charm. "Do you not believe me when I tell you that I find you most beautiful?"

Outside, a bank of clouds slid sideways, and more rays of moonlight advance into the room. It fell upon Bel — as always it would, Antonio thought. As if it had travelled the thousands of miles from the heavens just for the benefit of illuminating her.

"Whether you say that out of kindness, our out of deviousness, Antonio," his name rolled off her tongue like smooth wine. "I can never guess."

"Then don't." he replied, and kissed her.

.

.

.

_(notes._ was honestly on the fence on whether to post this chapter or to leave the fic as a one-shot. but my dearest beta c/immerwennesdunkelwird — well, _her_ work musn't go to waste, even if mine, by all means, should. also, this is fun.)


	3. o lord, let my soul

_three; o lord, let my soul_.

He broke away to look at her.

Bel's face was flushed, naked, and she was utterly still, though whether it was because of how firmly Antonio was holding her was not clear.

"Sir...?" she said, on a half-breath, just before he kissed her again. Only now the kiss continued. His tongue moved around the edge of her lips, then slipped softly inside. She let out a tiny breathless moan but did not resist. Her eyes were tightly closed and her hand hovered close to him, as if not knowing where to go. He lifted his mouth from hers.

"My name is Antonio," he said, and his voice was dangerously gentle. "Say it."

But as his lips came back, she flinched, as if jolting herself awake from a difficult dream. "No, Antonio."

The protest started as a flutter, dove wings against glass, becoming fiercer when he did not respond, so that now she was pushing, trying to get her hands between them. They were mushed together like the playing cards of a magician, colliding; a hanged man meeting with sweet temperance. "No, I cannot."

"Why?"

It was a true question, and one she could not imagine answering with any truth. Not when her chin was tipped up and parting the shadows around them, her face fearful of something bigger than the world, her body comfortable and maddeningly close in the space between his arms, feeling almost too small to contain her. He withdrew a caging arm to instead touch her waist, inches away from his hand, sliding an arm around her hip and pulling her in close. Relishing the sharp inhalation he felt more than heard next to his ear. Her body curled into his, frame bending under the touch of his hands — as many before did, but few so gracefully — the shade catching dark in the hollow of her clavicle, as stark as a martyr's heaven-touched flesh.

"Why?" he asked again, but silence was answer in itself. He had learned this long before.

Abruptly, he let her go and she moved away from him. He leant back against the wall, a strange expression on his face. She stood staring down at him, her breath coming in starts. He lifted his hands in mock-surrender. It was a gesture that she somehow knew was a way of swallowing down feelings so they were hidden from anyone watching.

His face told a different tale. _look at me_, it said. _i am what you see: easy on the eye, strong to the taste, a man with substance_. Someone to admire, for how can beauty this natural lie?

How indeed. The good-sized shoulders, the capable chest. And then the tapering of the waist, the well-turned calves. And the face, nested in all that glossy hair. The fine who-cares nose, the wind-raw lips, eyebrows always askew, unmatched, challenging. A face with charity and mockery displayed in equal measure.

_was such a face to be trusted_, she wondered. Then Antonio laughed.

"Nothing happened, _cariño_. It was a moment of love, that's all." But though the words were light, there was something in him that was not. Antonio moved to the door, like a man in a semi-trance. Before he left, he turned. His mouth opened to speak but nothing came out.

"Goodnight," was what he decided to say.

"Goodnight." she replied.

With the door closed, Bel sank down against the wall, hands clasped in her lap, staring at the floor. She lifted her fingers to her mouth, holding them there as if to feel the burn mark that he might have left.

.

She knew it was how housemaids were usually said to be. Conniving, manipulative young things; only putting on a show of subservience in order to reveal a more seductive nature in private to their employers, spreading their legs and slanting coy smiles. She wondered if the people who started this gossip hadn't mistaken kitchen-girls for sea-bound sirens, drawing in hapless men with their devil-given charms.

Even so, a housemaid she still was, with all the work that came with it. The gathering that was to be hosted was just in time before the beginning of Lent, or as Bel had taught Lovino, the three days before it, called _Vastenavond_. It hardly seemed right to have households feasting like gluttons when whispers of plague had been heard in the narrow alleyways and above the town canals. But Bel threw herself into the preparations with the same energy she spared daily tasks. Today, on a day when the sun could barely show itself behind a gauzy grey cloudy morning, it was to be a stew with mutton, citron, greens, and ginger. A nice, steaming _hutsepot_. A trip to the markets was in order, then.

She ran a finger over the top of a cabinet, checking for dust, looking down from the sun. She caught sight of Antonio looking over the balustrade, uncharacteristically silent. His face was angled forward. The light caught around the hair along his jaw, finer and fairer in the light, looking closer in color to her own than the dark curls on his head. Could he more fair-haired as a boy, she wondered, at ten, eleven, twelve? Did he look more like little Lovino? She watched the muscle in his throat tense and release in tandem with his fingers.

When he caught her eye, he still smiled, though it seemed even more insincere than it used to be. If such a thing were even possible.

Perhaps courtesy was bred into him, it seemed very much likely. And she was determined to return the favor, even if her own breeding demanded nothing of the sort. So she approached him with cautious steps, took a look at the palm of his suntanned hand covering the wrist of the other, and tried not to be overwhelmed by the stillness of him.

"Good day," she offered, stilted. As though they had reverted back to the unfamiliarity of the day they had first met. Was she still to call him by his Christian name?

"And to you."

"I'm heading for the _grotemarkt_ soon, sir, with your permission. Is there anything you might need from me before I go? Or anything in particular for me to pick up?"

He chuckled, smile curling around the edges. Did her attempt at mirroring his nobler manners look that transparent? "Ah, no, thank you."

Lying through one's teeth was a skill that must be relished at a court such as the one where he grew up. The thought of it made her body twitch in a manner embedded in the blood, a thousand miles away from her mind. Well, he was skilled at it, she thinks dispassionately; not that she would know (wouldn't she?)

"Sir, please," Bel said. "About the other night..."

"Nothing happened, _cariño_," he interrupted, his words a careful repetition, hammering it home. "Let's just not touch the subject again, yes?"

"But—"

"_Noli me tangere_," he said, aiming for teasing but ending up just shy of it. But she had written enough to her devout brother Lucas to know what the words meant.

It seemed that it was Revelations that captivated her dear little brother these days, with its dreams of locusts and fire and endings. Saint John's prophecies spoke of a world unraveling and creations monstrous enough to swallow it whole. She would read her brother's missives and the Biblical book itself until she forgot to blow out the lights; her head would ache behind her eyes when she forgot to sleep. Her stomach curled in on itself with a hunger bigger than flesh, to which she did not give name.

If anything, she would think in the dead of night when the time approached Matins, it was her supposed beauty that was monstrous, sweeping away any other aspect of her character. But wasn't that the meaning of _monstrare_, in the Latin that was so familiar to one who recited prayers daily? To frighten, to warn?

"You said you were going to the market, weren't you? Off with you, then." Antonio dismissed, smile still in place.

"Sir." she replied, hollow.

After all, it's said that God's mercy and His anger often wear the same face.

.

On his first night in his estate, Antonio had laid his head down upon a cushion and relearned his Lamentations.

He was not used to this: this lack of lassitude, the smoke of too-close candles in his eyes, the moist cool scent of rain in his skin. His bare face, washed clean of its pretensions but still recalling its lines. In the hasty communion that had been his farewell he'd been made anew; drawn to a new life, a new body, a petulant messiah breathing dust in the desert.

He was his own, now. Though not yet, not that night. That night, he had still been fasting, in preparation for Advent, denying himself the pleasures of eating flesh in hopes to properly celebrate the Annunciation of the Virgin, the birth of Christ-child, an attempt to echo the proceedings in the court he once deemed home. December months were kinder in Aragón than up north, though fasts and veils of piety had continued, led in example by the king. It was unkind to think so but Antonio couldn't help but sense that the reverent pageantry displayed _was _but a veil, where flesh-and-blood pleasure and ambition seethed beneath.

Bored, he had switched gospels for romances, soon abandoning the witty prose of de Cervantes for old stories of Rome. He tilted his chin skyward, ceiling-ward, to the dome of the roof overhead. He muttered nonsense and placed a hand on his forehead in habit, fingers fidgeting without the usual beads of sweat to wipe. In the gold trappings of the room he had felt candle-light, holy light, reflecting onto his upraised cheeks and browbones. Beneath his closed lids came out images in searing rich color, leftovers of the tales that he had just read; one in particular, its old inks staining his fingertips. He frowned.

He had another namesake, he knew. A war-general, one who was enthroned in a marketplace, sitting in the city of his Alexandrian lover dressed as a king as she descended to him as nothing but a goddess. The two had gone beyond turning themselves into stars; they had performed godhood, and expected the universe itself to comply. Mythical, almost, even as they still lived.

_give me my robes, put on my crown_. A flicker of candle-light dropped an illicit kiss on the bare hollow of Antonio's neck, as if licensed. Heat coiled low in his stomach. _for i have immortal longings in me._

And in the stories about this namesake of his, there was always talk of destiny, about people as pawns in a chess game of the gods. He had wondered, sometimes. He wondered still. Did the general lie in his queen's arms, waiting for the poison of his thoughts to overtake him as much as his blade did, and there was so much — his hands were covered in blood more than his own and there was no use of pretending otherwise, no use _no_ _use_. But then he forgot who, exactly, he was wondering about.

Marcus Antonius had been grandiose. Hubristic, vicious. A Mars to Cleopatra's Venus.

_but_ _then_, his mind whispered traitorously. _marcus_ _antonius_ _had_ _died_.

.

It was the waning of the moon and the fog of winter's end was thick as soup. Her brother, now no longer even bothering to hide his frequent trips out of the house, paid most of his due visits to guilds and alehouses. Ever stolid, he went about his business, maneuvering over the streets that froze up into icy ruts every night. He seemed very Dutch in the way he was buttoned and swaddled against the weather, as stoic and skeptical as a Frisian cow. When he returned, he came with a collection of news about the latest sufferers of the plague.

"We shouldn't seem ungrateful for our room and board here," he said to his sister, which sounded so different from the usual complaints he had of his patron Bel struggled not to ask just _how_ much he had drank. "If we were tossed onto the streets again, there to find lodging and food in some more despicable spot, we'd undoubtedly put ourselves in the path of contagion. God has seen fit to secure us here, and we must praise him for his providence. Our Heavenly Father takes care of his own."

"And a brother must take care of his own too, I suppose," said Bel, but darkly, pitching a potato into the fireplace. The reproach was clear. Niels was spending too much time away, and not enough time on the actual portrait he was commissioned to do. He spoke of being thankful for a place to stay, hearty meals coming three times a day — yet his constant, if silent, impertinence towards his patron must be coming close to endangering it.

"Subtlety was never your strong suit, sis. And yes, I should say so. The plague is even worse further south, I'm told," said Neils. "Luxembourg is bearing the brunt of it. Signs of it have also been sighted as up far as Utrecht, too. _Again_, mind you. This is a prosperous country and a fine time to be alive for all who will live to tell the tale. I won't be thrown out on the street to watch my family starve, or waste away with the pox, or dribble their insides out with bloody flux."

Bel grimaced. "A lovely image, brother."

"Besides, who are you to talk?" Niels mowed on, unmoved by attempt at humor. "You take care of yourself, I've noticed, in any way that comes to hand, thanks to our employer."

"I am paid for services rendered, just as you are," she replied, disliking the implications that her brother, who claimed to care so much about family, was throwing in her face. "And might I remind you that it was you who brought me into the household and allowed it? Making me have a trade?"

"Hah, is that what they call it, a trade," said Niels. "I believe that you are good at your 'trade.' And no, though I may have been the one to bring us under his employ, I certainly have no say in what might come _after_."

"That's right," she said. "You _don't_. And I say that it is only from guilt that one can find the strength to make such claims of others."

A long pause morphed into a silence. Then she huffed. "There's too much work to be done to waste our time in talk. If you can't help, then you must excuse me."

"Sis, I—"

"No," she interrupted. ""You're not my father. We both lost one and right now I have no need for someone attempting to be another," she said to him, snatching her cleaning rag into her hands before picking herself up and walking out the back door. Her shoes weren't all the way on her feet, so she stopped at a corner to pull them on. A bird cried outside, far away, distracting her from the argument she had fled from and she had wondered where it was going and where it had been. She glanced to see a vase of wilting flowers sitting atop the table, and was reminded of her job that needed doing. Her brother was nowhere in her sights.

She hadn't lied; there was indeed a _lot_ to be done. Bel wasn't familiar with customs of Spain when it came to throwing a party, but if it wasn't obvious from the lack of Calvinist abstemiousness, it should be from the frantic orders yelled in throaty Catalán, echoing throughout the house: it was to be a great undertaking, this gathering, and entirely Spanish in nature.

There were bowls of oysters soaking in saltwater and vinegar, and a brace of hares to unfasten from the spit, and a spill of produce from the cold cellar to be cooked in various ways. Bel, having made her harrumphing procession about, returned with rapid feet down the steps to the kitchen, and there she set a couple of hired girls and her own self to task. Lovino showed up in the doorway looking for a glass of water. He was assigned to scrubbing potatoes before he even knew what was happening.

Bel worked furiously the rest of the days without speaking, selecting the most perfect fruit, withdrawing the bread from the side oven, preparing and spicing the quails, hurrying with the newly-purchased blooms. For the hour was approaching when the Young Woman with Wildflowers would be unveiled to ravenous merchants and men of good breeding.

.

The candles were lit, the tables spread with linen, and Antonio had seated himself for a moment at the virginal. "What a picture," he said to Niels, but the latter didn't hear the slight sourness in his voice, merely answering in a tone less at ease that what his face might suggest, "Oh, yes, isn't she?"

Two maids from a household down the street had come to assist in the serving, so Bel could stand at the door and supervise both kitchen and dining salon at once. Lovino had been roped into collecting cloaks and staffs and hats, buoyed by the promise of extra plates of sweetmeats and sugared fruits, as well as a kiss goodnight. He had turned red and decidedly brought a stool to the doorway, wondering to himself about the whole social affair, until at last there was a knock on the door and the first of the _burghers _arrived.

The good citizens of the town had many thoughts about the Aragonese noble hosting the party, living in so close vicinity to them. The Dutch could be sullenly tolerant of their own House of Orange residing in the Hague; but royalty of a different stripe, be it Stuarts or Bourbons or, Lord forbid, _true _Spanish Habsburgs, carried a different prestige. If it could even be called thus. Everyone was aware of the severe reputation that cloaked the royal courts of Spain, and so to have in their midst a young _prince étranger_ raised in such a court — Catholic to the bone and was ready enough to shout it from the rooftops, if need be — the stories and gossip practically created themselves. _an_ _overcompensation_, _surely_, said the crones and granddames sagely. Perhaps for a spotty, hypocritical, _conversos _-stained family history; that had less _limpieza de sangre_ than boasted — who knew?

But the subject of the gossip wasn't yet to be seen, playing a coy host that wasn't to emerge until at least half-an-hour. Instead a devil's garden of blossoms: women in high color, flaming cheeks and gowns, fantastical combinations that warred against each other like the worst patch of summer weeds. Some of the town regents: portly men in black with colored sashes and ceremonial swords and chests full of ribbons, medallions, and lace. The ruffs were so high and stiff that their goatees looked ready for harvesting. As the made themselves comfortable, many of the partygoers had taken refuge in the relative anonymity along the margins of the room, underneath the balcony. They were packed like fish in a crate.

In time, Bel's brother appeared. His new coat with its bit of braid, coupled with the Dutch stoicism he was born with, did little to disguise his fretfulness. He made a round about the hall, greeting those he knew, muttering curt — shy, perhaps; though it would likely be dubbed later as chilly — hellos to strangers. Several he made the effort of conversing with, hushed and low. Almost at once he escaped to the kitchen, where he shucked off the new coat and sat on an empty stool. He fiddled with his hands for a bit.

"They are a worthy lot," said Niels to his sister, who, though in the midst of last-minute preparations, took a moment to remark in a voice carefully blank: "You look like you're doing well out there, brother."

"These men admire the talented and they count themselves as learned. Do you know that some of them have invested in the settlement of the New Netherlands across the tremendous Atlantic?"

"They have an uncommon passion for paintings, these Dutch," said Bel, as if in this instance she understood herself to be entirely and safely something other. As if one kiss one night from one Spaniard had marked her as different. She stopped herself. What was she thinking? What a laughable thought!

"And why shouldn't they?" asked Niels. "The marvelous Reformation has torn away icon and ornament from churches. What's left from the hungry eye to admire? Our fellow Dutchmen make do with tedious scenes of merry company. Scenes of meadow, woodland, the lot of the common husbandrymen. Views of the city from this aspect or that. Or views from the comic lot of the desperately poor."

That last one hit a little too close to home, though she was too gladdened by the hint of excitement in her brother's words to properly admonish him.

"When your painting is met with approval," said Bel, choosing her words deliberately — _when_, not _if_. _when_. "Just watch: you'll paint all of that. You'll spend your time gazing on the thick jowls and the double-chins of everyone with guldens enough to pay you for their likeness."

"Don't remind me," he groaned. "My possible patrons are out there in the reception room right now. And I have enough trouble dealing with the one patron I have now."

"Don't forget that he is also the host of this splendid occasion," she added, sounding slightly bitter, though she didn't know why. "There is no shortage of subjects, Niels, nor coin to pay you for painting them."

"There's no shortage of painters this side of the Low Countries, either," he muttered, almost inaudible. He watched as his sister laid a pair of poached salmon on a salver and worked them with her fingers to move the flesh back to correct form. He grabbed a filled jug and inspected it closely, his hands almost covering its' top.

"So you have a mixed mind? Like most of us. You want the work and the reputation, and you also want to despise your patrons for refusing to pay for religious subjects. This way," she said in attempted good cheer — when they were small children she used to enjoy teasing him so. "You can be unhappy whatever happens next."

"Bless your magnanimity, sis," Niels replied, dryly. "But the patrons also talk of other things. Like I said, most of them had the courage to stake investments on expeditions across oceans. For the more cautious of them, they play at the market for tulips. I've heard that there has even more money to be made in it this year, due to a strong season in the Exchange in Amsterdam. I've been meaning to tell you—"

Antonio was at the door. "Maestro, we're going into the next room to show them your work," he said. "And you are here gabbling in the vegetables like a soup-boy? Get out here, and prepare, at your advanced age, to make your career, and to make mine as well."

Niels did not rise to the bait; to the petty, feeble jab about the few years he had over his impatient patron. He did, however, nod and dutifully step outside into the halls. Antonio made a show of shaking his head at him, before swiveling back to glance at the kitchen. Bel looked up from her work.

Their gazes met, but Antonio left without a word.

.

"Here it is, a major work by a minor artist," Antonio cried. "Splendid, isn't it. Subjects like this inspire artists to heights of achievement. It's hard to distinguish which is more magnificent, the beauty of the girl or the sensitive skill of the rendering — but I suppose it doesn't matter. This is what art does, confuses the senses so to magnify the appreciation of the heart." He peered at it, a strange expression etched upon his face.

"The artist, Maestro Niels Johanssen," cried the Spanish host, and raised his glass. His guests froze, as they didn't know the protocol.

"To the Maestro," exhorted Antonio. "To the Maestro," weakly replied those nearest him, while other farther away said more boisterously, "To the Maestro!"

Niels stepped forward four or five inches, gave the tiniest little bow, which might as well have been a stretch to aid in the digestion of some lumpen bite of pork pie. He looked pleased and guilty and sullen and tired, all at once.

"The portrait looks incongruous in a Spaniard's home," a hushed whisper opined, much to the ill-disguised amusement of certain guests.

"Why?"

"Simply in the fact that it is not their home," was the reply. "This estate is on Dutch land."

Lovino exploded, his attempt at being courteous for his cousin's social affair shattering — it's the only word that fit — and dropped like shards of a mirror. "You _dare_—!"

"Hmm. Is it? A paper bearing a royal seal in my possession—" The calmness in Antonio's voice was admirable. He looked around the room as if to enunciate without words what else might be in his possession. "You see, it says otherwise."

"Whose royal seal, Catalan?" the guffaw seemed deafening. "Your king Philip's? Forgeries of those are readily available, when one knows where to look, are they not? And I would hazard that your esteemed self does. Know."

Several guests with more tact — or probably with more Spanish gold weighing their pockets than honest guldens, unkind rumors would later suggest — attempted to diffuse the tension. "This is no place for discord, _Heers_."

The belligerents would not be assuaged. "No? Where better, then?"

Antonio bared his teeth. "I don't care. Not in _my _home," he said. "This is my family's estate and I possess it lawfully. I have the papers to prove it, and I would not have a gathering intended for celebration degenerate into something we civilized gentlemen know better than to commit."

"Ah, but what is family to the Spanish? And with history half tainted by the Moors, and another half marred by corruption and oppression taking the guise of churchly endeavors, I always thought the notion of 'civilization' would be a foreign one."

"And you Dutch would harvest the very bones out of the skins of men who disagree with you," Antonio hissed, voice rough, decorum thrown out the window. He threw back his head and laughed — a short, stifled laugh; more scornful than delighted, but a laugh nonetheless — and every conversation for twelve feet in every direction came to a halt. "Oh no, you wouldn't, if you find you couldn't resell them for a profit."

"Sir, please, you speak ill of my countrymen," Niels finally said. "And there is no saying what a man is capable of on his family's behalf."

"And on his own," interrupted Lovino, with a steady vehemence that surprised even him.

"I know that in a family, the good of one member advances the good of all members. Though," Niels added under his breath, though apparently not quite lowly enough. "I imagine you wouldn't know something like that, little Vargas. Or maybe you _would_."

It was unclear what happened next; the room was struck silent. Guests glanced at one another; one small, slow girl hired to serve the water already hiding her face in her apron. Lovino sat up straight, and he was suddenly no longer a child but a stripling adult, with all the feisty disregard for authority that came with it. His lower lip stopped trembling and his eyebrows drew closer together. He seemed ready to rise from the table and fling something at the man who had offended him, while Niels seemed very displeased.

But before he could, a sound from the other end of the table caused all heads to turn. There was a clatter of dining utensils, and a spilled glass of port. The room gasped.

Though Antonio was a son of Aragón through and through, he had been about five years old when he spent two seasons in Valencia. In his mind's eye he could still see himself gawping up at the broad shoulders of Saint Martin's statue on the Puente de Serranos, one of the two bridges spanning the river Turia. Unfortunately, his awe had been ruined when he looked down and spied a body bob up from the waters, so his family had said. He had not screamed, but instead was scared into a week-long silence.

When he was older, he understood that every day in Valencia was perfect for vendetta and revenge. No city in all of Spain had as many blood-feuds and murders, and the killing increased during Shrove Tuesday, the debauchery preceding Ash Wednesday and forty days of Lenten contrition. Which was today, he realized. The day of _carne vale_. The last of Antonio's thoughts trickled slowly, like smoke. _how_ _fitting_.

The small serving girl came sprinting into the kitchen. A white panic had come up in her face. She trembled and, to Bel's astonishment, made a face that anyone could read. The mute girl grasped her own neck and bulged her eyes out. The gargle of her uneducated throat completed the message. A thud punctuated its' end, while the halls erupted in cries that made Bel's blood run cold.

(_carne vale._ farewell to the flesh.)

The host was sick, sick or bludgeoned, or fainted, or dead.

.

.

.

_(tbc.)_


	4. where's the way to the dwelling of light

_four; where is the way to the dwelling of light?_

"Oh, _Christ_," swore Bel — she couldn't help herself. But in the commotion no one heard her, and she bit back the urge to repeat it, in case a stoat-toothed devilkin was crouching beneath the hutch or worming through the embers, listening in for blasphemy. She rushed to the dining hall and saw the fury and terror in Lovino's face like an interior storm. Over the roof and against the windows, the wind had come up. The house was besieged.

Bel rocked the boy aside and took a closer look at Antonio. "Go for the doctor, brother," she barked, taking charge in the midst of the guests already heading to scatter. "And you, my love, back, out of here. Come, Lovino, listen to me. _Out_."

With a wordless nod, Niels slipped away and was at the back door. He was winding his cloak up against his chin when there was a sharp rap. He started, and so did Lovino, who tailed him into the shadows of the hallway for want of anything else to do, their previous enmity forgotten. Guests were filing out from the front gates, gossiping and worrying about the fallen host. Niels moved to open the door slowly, to peer around it and see who might be approaching at this hour. But the wind struck a blow as he unlatched the hasp, and the door was thrown to with a crash.

"High wind, is all," gasped Niels to Lovino, who was close to tears, in a rare kindly gesture meant to console him. It was clear that it was taking all of Lovino's willpower not to back himself against the wall as if more spirits were abroad in the dark weather and galloping their spectral steeds in the noisy air. Branches cracked, and out in a distant room it sounded as if a table suddenly turned on its face, or was that more mischief afoot, more belligerent partygoers attempting to pilfer Peruvian silver? — and there, at the door, nothing.

"You see? Only wind. Stay put, boy." the Maestro's voice was rough and cracked, as if he's been shouting himself hoarse. He used his tall, imposing figure to heave Lovino to the side as a bull would tumble a pesky hound, and with that, threw himself into the dark and disappeared from view. Before the door swung shut, Lovino spied several stout men in heavy capes, following after him.

Lovino returned to the dining hall, stumbling like a baby deer, where Bel can be heard in the kitchen heating a cauldron of water and calling for the slicing of lemons. He swayed involuntarily and thudded his back against the wall. His face was mucky with fretting. He caught his breath. One of his hands was reaching out to steady himself against a dark oak chest. When Bel rushed out, she stopped in her tracks when she met his eyes; bewildered and heavy with unshed tears.

"Lovino, my love," said Bel, bending down and hurriedly wiping at his face. "You mustn't fuss yourself. Everything will turn out all right. The weather is the hand of God, and so is the course of sickness—"

"The plague," Lovino whispered, eyes wide and horrified. "No—!"

"No," she repeated, sternly. "No, dear one, no. Not now. Now you must come with me, for I would have your help."

He helped her carry his unconscious cousin to his chambers, determined to shoulder more of his weight than she. Antonio was laid on his bed, a cloth spread underneath, insulating the warmth of the fire that was quickly creeping into the room. Lovino couldn't help himself: he studied the scene. The bright red of the newest coughed blood, the brick brown of older, dryer spatterings. Soot-colored stains smudging the edges of Antonio's mouth, dripping down his jaw — charcoal mixed with water, forced down his throat as a first-aid against possible poison. The goldfish scales of the copper kettle on the small table, to keep hot water at hand at all times. The brown shadows in which Bel had done the work of assembling an impromptu poultice of garlic and lemons. The smell was milder here than in the kitchens, where it had been so ferocious, even the cat looked offended and kept his distance.

Lovino realized his caretaker had no time for any more pleasantries when, with a snap of her fingers, he was quickly sent to hunt for extra blankets in the cupboard of the next room. Antonio seemed unaccountably chilled, even near the fireplace. Lovino returned with an armful and said, truthfully, that the halls of the house were too frightening for him to brave alone. But Bel told him, more softly this time, that she was needed to keep vigil, to provide any first-aid his cousin might need, when he wakes.

_if he wakes_, Lovino thought, and then shook his head.

After a while he settled himself in a stool by her side until he drifted into a fitful nap. Bel spared a moment to carry him to his bed, not forgetting her promise of a goodnight kiss even when his eyelids were screwed shut, brow knotted in worry.

It was late in the evening when the doctor was located at last — on the dunes, where the storm winds had crossed the sea, tossing whales and scattering shoals of herring like flecks of sand — a last ship bearing precious cargo, precious onion-shaped bulbs so many had invested in; driven in a mad passion to make money on speculation — the ship was making progress, no, the ship has sunk, _no_ —

The doctor was located with other witnesses of the disaster that _was inevitable _— _that might be averted _— _just wait, just wait, just wait _—

The doctor's arrival waked Lovino. Though he crouched in the stairwell to overhear, he couldn't make out his hushed report to the Johanssen siblings. But after the doctor left, Lovino ventured into the halls, rubbing his eyes, pretending to be just awakened. He only took a step before he was stopped.

"...These are adult things, and he is a child." he heard Bel say.

"We were less of children at his age," was the listless reply. "And if the plague does take hold in this household—"

"Brother!"

"—We might find ourselves well out of this sorry dilemma. We might," he said. "Even benefit more if Sir Antonio goes to his grave."

"Niels, _stop_," she hissed. "You aren't in your right mind. Go rest, and allow me to sponge the poor man down. This isn't like you, brother. You mustn't say such a thing."

"You find the little Vargas, then, and you do the deed of charity. If we can still afford it," There was a brief moment of silence, and Lovino shut his eyes. Then, he heard a soft whisper, exhausted and low. "Of course I don't mean such dreadful things, sis. Of course I don't."

There was a pause, and then the sound of a door opening and closing. Heavy footsteps fading into the hallway.

_the hardest of times were the coldest_, Lovino realized with a sudden longing for Rome's heat, for his brother's excited chatter, for his older cousin's hale laughter. _the hardest of times were the coldest_, he returned to his bed and huddled into himself,_ when spring was only a dim hope_.

.

The next day, the town was already awash in rumors. The amount of it seemed to grow with the hour: there were rumors of a ship, once brimming with valuable loads, straggling up the ice-choked Saarne — not foundering, but not filled as it once was, as it should have been. Rumors of local investors, suffering serious losses, their wealth suddenly gone as if torn down by jackals. Rumors of families disappearing under cover of darkness, leaving their entire houses and much heavy furniture to be repossessed. Rumors of a belligerent, minor nobleman from Spain, struck down by sickness. By the act of God.

Niels, it seemed, had put off his previously more social demeanor, preferring to spend more time at the house than he had before. Of course — with a patron out cold and confined to his bed; the reason why he did not continue painting the commissioned portrait seemed obvious enough. There was no longer any need to hunt for procrastination excuses out in the town when there was one true and valid enough. Where Niels once had spent his days lingering at the public house where the college of tulip-traders met, treating men to rum and sherry; he now spent at his sister's command, helping her churn the butter, sketching silly little comics of her minding the hearth.

"Surely you would want to go back to our home, brother, to your own studio?" Bel said that late afternoon, as Niels tried to shoo away the cat that persisted in pussyfooting about his ankles. Antonio, still not yet awake, was in his rooms upstairs, with little Lovino occupying himself as far away as he could manage.

"Would that I could," he muttered, red chalk smudging in his hands.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean," he began, swallowing. Her brother sat slumped on a bench. One shoulder lifted higher than the other; at first she thought he was in tears. But his face was sallow and his eyes apparently drained of tears, and his expression seemed blanker than anything else. "That we are ruined. And that the curse of my greed has been our undoing."

She laughed, as she used to do when her brother went into one of his moods and needed some cheering up, but stopped short when she saw he didn't laugh with her. "And that?" she asked. "What does that mean?"

Niels' voice was weighty, but soft in something resembling consolation for her, and she recognized the look on his face. Guilt was not an expression worn easily by her brother.

She thought of Antonio, pale and half-lifeless. She thought of Antonio, eyes rolling into his head and vomiting watered-down charcoal, breathless after purging himself of bile and blood.

"Niels?" she said, voice smaller than it had ever been. He did not look up at her. "Brother, what have you _done_?"

He took her into his rooms and sat her down, hands upon her shaking shoulders looking to calm them.

"Please understand. What I did was try to build a future for us," he said. "As the market for tulips rise and the one for paintings wane. And it seems," he swallowed. "That I have failed even in that."

"You would put the mortal bodies of your _family_," she spat out the word, mouth curling into an ironic, mocking smile. Her voice edged on hysteria. "At risk instead? When we have nothing left to eat, I'll be sure to _thank_ you for saving my soul."

"Do not blaspheme, sis," he said. "It doesn't beautify you to do so."

"What does beauty matter to me?" she almost shrieked. "Tell me what you have done, and spare me nothing! I'm not as young and ignorant as I once was, as you would have me be forever!" More quietly, she said, "I have not been so in a long time."

Niels stared at his sister in what seemed like an eternity.

Then he explained, "For the last several weeks the value of the newest variety of tulip has risen, and risen, and on the street and in the halls the same lots of bulbs were being sold again and again, for ever higher prices, wave after wave of profit. Everyone knew this; everyone had invested. And so would I, I thought. So too would I dabble in the game that others have been dabbling in, only I used the commission money that I earned from Sir Antonio, and invested in a stock that others only speculated upon."

"Surely that's not the misfortune. That's merely commerce, supplying what's in demand!" Bel said, in desperation to salvage this, to save herself from hearing what she thought she was to hear.

Niels continued. "One man could pay a fortune for the future value of the bulb crop, and turn around and sell his share for two fortunes an hour later. Men were buying not to own the tulips but to sell them again to the most aggressive purchaser. And the value of the lot of tulips, over which I had been advised by men in alehouse, had risen eightfold since we moved into this household. And a man who had never invested in them, never saw them, never sweated over their possible loss in the storms at sea—" here he gritted his teeth. "—Never trod the dunes watching and praying, could make eight times in an hour what a _painter_ made in three months! And I thought: why should we be denied income like that? Finally, a chance of obtaining a fortune, a fortune that wasn't inherently denied to us due to our low birth."

"Born high or low, we are low now." his sister whispered.

"So I went to do the same as our neighbors," said Niels grimly. "No — I thought I'd do more. I wouldn't just pay for the import of the bulbs and sell them, but I hazarded a guess that there would be buyers wanting to spend even more on the lot than I could! So I bought back my share with the intention to sell it again in a little while, and build up our coffers, and make us _burgher_s worthy of our father's name."

"And the tulips, what of them? Did they burn? Had they been infested with worms?" said Bel, beginning to understand.

"Those that were not lost on the damned ship, are the same tulips as ever they were," said her brother. "Not more beautiful or less beautiful. Simply less desirable. Just as I stopped by an inn a few nights before Sir Antonio's party, having promised to pay the highest amount yet offered, and as I began to negotiate to sell for an even higher amount, news about sickness on the far side of town began to filter in. One of the purchasers who has a farm out that way excused himself from the bidding and went to check on relatives. Another merchant stroked his chin and said he couldn't afford to bid. And suddenly the mood had changed, and as news of the ship grew worse, one by one the _burghers_ and merchants began to offer their own lots for sale. The bulbs had, in an instant, become less valuable, though they are still the same bulbs, still ready for planting, still offering the same amount of beauty."

Bel pressed her lip together.

"And of future value — it vanished like smoke. The tulips don't offer the same amount of return, and, like a wind suddenly veering from the east when it has blown from the west, the appetite for investing in tulip bulbs has become, in a night, a frantic desire to unload them, to sell them for whatever could be gotten," he dragged a hand over his face. "The prices have been dropping precipitously all week."

"They'll surely rise again?" she said, though with doubt.

"The other night I had already sold them for a thirtieth what I paid," said Niels. "I had to. The next I know they might be worth a ninetieth."

Bel couldn't help but repeat, "And what does that mean?"

"It _means_," said Niels coldly, "I owed in cash and financial instruments many, many times more than any of our poor savings are worth. We were bankrupt, more so than we had been, and had no resources. It meant that we might lurch into a deeper poverty. It means that I had to find myself a chance to be bold, to reclaim my family and what little fortune we had."

"And so you banked on the hatred the townsmen bore the Spanish," said Bel. "And to clear your debts you had offered to kill your patron, a noble of Aragón."

"What? No!" Niels whirled around. "What talk is this, sis?" he cried. "So many Spanish-hating Dutch and _I _am your primary suspect?"

"You've made it clear how much you dislike him, and living under his roof you must have ample chances! Is that not suspect enough?"

"The same could be said about you! Christ, even _I_ wouldn't dare commit _murder_!" he hissed. "Any moment we can be struck down, by plague if not by more insolvency. Even I wouldn't dare put my immortal soul in peril. And if you thought that I would, then maybe you and I are not to be siblings after all—!"

"No," she gasped, and rushed towards him. Her arms snaked around his torso and she clutched at him like a lifeline. "No, brother, you're all I have. You're all I have now. You're all I've had for so long."

He sighed. "And you me," he said, a hand curling into her hair, trying to still her shaking form. "I wouldn't deny that the suggestion might have been offered to me. But I _refused_, sis, and you _must_ believe me. When I came by the kitchen last night, in before my work was unveiled, what I was truly doing was checking for poison in the food. Poison that I had refused to plant myself, but..." his smile was self-pitying. "...It seems I have failed at that, too."

Bel didn't let go.

"There's precious little that I wouldn't do for our family, even foolishly, you know that now," he said. "But murder is not one of them. Not against something, or someone, that my sister cares for."

"I—" she stuttered, releasing him. "I don't know what you're talking about."

Her brother stood there, still as a statue. Niels did not move to hold his sister again; Bel knew that wasn't her brother's way. But when he spoke again his cool voice was tender enough, and for a moment that was warmth in itself.

"Then," he said, turning to leave. "I pray you figure it out soon."

.

His cousin was now a limp puppet of his former self, Lovino thought, as the sun set and poured its harsh rays into his own room, the candle guttering piteously in defiance. A puppet, a rag, without a manipulating hand inside. As he watched Bel come and go in the halls to ply Antonio with reliable tisanes given by the doctor last night, Lovino vowed to find the doctor should his studies of the physic prove to be a failure. He would ensure that Antonio's soul, when — not if. When — it departed, would not depart alone.

The entire day Lovino had spent missing his old life in Rome. He even missed his little cardinal-to-be brother, who had been full of a very household sort of joy, like the kind that abounded from ripe grapes, from big-bellied lutes. In the mornings, when Lovino used to emerge to practice his fencing, Feliciano would hear and come rushing to watch, eager as a puppy. Though supposedly a future prince of the Church, Feliciano had been the simple sort — but was it true to say that? Simple, yes, yet also fawning and sly. Lovino learned this when his little brother had merely watched with blank eyes as their grandfather had sent Lovino away to be fostered — simple didn't always mean shallow.

The Vargas family was bold and proud. And pride Lovino had in abundance. Pride would see him through this devil's maze.

What was it that his grandfather used to tell him, to prepare him as a soldier, a future commander of men? _take responsibility only for the future, not the past_. _the past couldn't hurt you the way the future can_.

"...Not if you have survived it so far." he completed grimly.

"What's that, my love?" Bel asked.

"Nothing."

She watched as the boy turned a shoulder to her. "I see you have forbidden yourself to look upon your cousin. Surely you haven't forbidden yourself to look at me, as well?"

"I am busy," Lovino said with as much dignity as he could muster, though there was nothing to watch but flies ponderously dotting and flitting at the windowsill.

Even if he had vowed to gut those who had caused Antonio to succumb to unconsciousness, be it true poisoners or merely unfortunate carriers of the _mal aria_ — bad air — that brought the plague upon him; well, if nothing else he could applaud their zeal, couldn't he? Lovino had decided: monstrous as they might be, why shouldn't anyone arrange the world around them to suit themselves? Wouldn't everyone, if they could?

The room felt clammy, before finally Bel said, "Shall we pray the rosary together, Lovino?"

She unclasped her hands so that she might offer one in his direction. It felt prurient, almost voyeuristic to a point; as if her gesture had inadvertently punctured an invisible wall Lovino had built around himself, though he had no idea why he thought so. Bel, his minder, his tutor, the very image of the Young Woman with Wildflowers put on display the night his cousin had collapsed — she had been nothing if not kind to him. Hadn't she?

"Shall we pray for your cousin's recovery, and this household's continued good health? Come, let us kneel together."

Bel reached out, grasped his hand and laid it over hers. She barely even got to bow her head before she stopped and pulled her hand away again.

"Oh, but where is your crucifix, my love?" she asked, using her free fingers to set brush the collars of Lovino's shirt aside. "At times like this, you need something as constant as God to soothe your spirit—"

"I do not need my crucifix," Lovino interrupted. His voice was dull, and his eyes were as hollow as a corpse's, as if they have been bled from memories, staring without seeing. He rose to his feet and left Bel alone to kneel in supplication to heaven.

"I do not need God," he said. "I do not need anyone."

.

Inheritance was tricky game to play; especially in the Fernández family. Several generations back — both many and few enough to be forgotten and remembered at leisure — there had been a _conversos _sailor, who made his fortune participating in Columbus' voyage. His family grew as he married up and soon he had claimed a branch connection to the older, more pure-blooded Carriedos of Valencia. Though previously he had claimed his poverty was a virtue, once the sailor had achieved power, he began to desire a family lineage befitting his new standing. It was a suitable arrangement for both families: the sailor and his descendants would be deemed to possess blue blood, and the Carriedos of Valencia would have their share of esteem, being related to a man who took part in a blessed, renowned exploration.

They had no room in the family tree for an errant son who threatened their continued consolidation of power — at least, what little of it the crumbling crown of Spain could offer.

The king himself had overseen the proceedings of his departure and watched with a grim mouth. The very night before that, Antonio's family had ordered a record on paper of every estate, every holding, every exchange ever made. The words in which the commerce had been carried out were salty, or apologetic. But Antonio himself — he had spoken little, or not at all.

It was only when he caught sight of a Young Woman with Wildflowers did his tongue feel loosened, from both silence, as well as from lies.

When Antonio had marked Bel for his own and pulled her in to kiss him, lips weren't only a disputed territory that he's laying his claim on because what he tasted there was a new kind of future. Maybe, he thought, it didn't have to be about inheritance games anymore, about what his blood said he could and could not have. Maybe he could have this victory and keep it and have won forever. If he had this, it might be the only victory he'd need.

He saw her soul calling out to him as something he could move against and perhaps devour, take into his own itching, edging stained-glass-green reverence and keep from going completely mad with the thought that he didn't _belong_ here, in this estate with its fine trappings and grim northern weather; but neither did he belong in court, where battles were fought with lies and intrigue. Which, though it called to something in him, wasn't all the way there, was missing something. Maybe it was her he was missing. And if he dreamed of forests in the dark, and following behind her with his jaws snapping for her ankles, what then?

There had been no painting in her brother's house anywhere near as compelling as hers, even the devotional ones. True, all saints were inevitably good-looking. All of Maestro Johanssen's portraits of the holy populace had been wreathed in light, their eyes crazed with vision. But hers was not, _she_ was not.

If the Maestro had been of a more morbid breed of painters, perhaps, he would have painted many portrayals of Death as he did of saints. What was Death like? A monster with a smile like a scythe; who came whether asked or not — did his job heedless of a mother's cries or the pleas of fathers. Because Death was — terrible and mighty but also welcome; natural and transcendental both. But there was also Death the beauty, the scrupulous keeper of appointments; who knocked politely and brought the relief from great pain and age. An angel crowned in snowdrops and portrayed in merciful clemency.

He'd seen, too, works of Flemish men he saw in the studio of Arentz — works which highlighted the inhuman emotionlessness of both death and life. The latter clinging to blankets and beseeching, pulse humming in her throat; heart pounding — as loudly as one's own might. Because, well, Death would always be enthralled by life — he hungered for her, lusted after her, stalked behind her every step, inhaled her every breath.

And weren't there stories of this, of Death chasing the maiden? Or of a man looking to rescue her from Death's clutches? Because once winter passed and one remembered one's reverence, the looming faces of long-dead kings or priests to the king of the dead who wore his face, one also remembered the journeyman who walked among them; dwarfed and yet bold enough to carry his light.

He thought of sons of men, hanging from trees and achieving transcendence as carrions eyed their bodies hungrily. Death and knowledge bound together; inextricable and defined by one another. The road to danger, to the realm of the dead and back, was the road to enlightenment, and all heroes walked it.

He, burdened with his many sins, just wasn't sure he was one.

Antonio cooled in his bed; he whispered nonsense before he fell asleep, to a young woman at his side, voice catching on a mouthful of blood:

"Mercy," he said. "God have mercy."

A sick man's fever dream: Bel pressed her lips to the peeling flesh of his forehead and did not think of it, of the taste of mortality congealing on her lips or the cracked hymn of his wishes. They quieted soon enough.

_i pray_, her brother had said. _you figure it out soon_.

She sat there the entire night, Salome-like, with her lover's head in her lap.

.

He awoke to his own startled, hoarse gasp; and the entire room seemed to gasp with him, fluttering into being, dripping washed-out colors that brightened with every slow blink.

He awoke to Niels, opening the window to let the morning air in, a man only slightly older than him but already burdened with heavy thoughts before his time. His crop of blond hair blazed in the sun, white fire; and Antonio could hardly see him, just a glare of light, a benediction disguised in curt remarks and bold strokes of a paintbrush.

He awoke to Lovino, who had succumbed to soft snores at the edge of his bedside, head resting in adolescent arms. The bones of his shoulders seemed a little broader, his jaw a little stronger, his brow fuller and more furrowed; and Antonio realized that his young baby cousin was growing into manhood, with all the curses that came with it.

He awoke to Bel, stepping inside with demure eyes, and then stopping as if arrested, backlit by the sunlight splashing in the doorway and reflecting off newly washed tiles, hovering like a Catholic angel, her blonde hair escaping its hastily-tied ribbon in a nimbus, her very arches poised as if to avoid fallen pins. It all gave her a look of one who had just set down from heaven. Or a Thisbe, come to whisper her love; and he her slovenly Pyramus.

"Sir," she said, breathless. "You're awake." _you're alive_.

"I..." Antonio started, gravelly and barely audible. Lovino started, and Niels whipped his head over his shoulder. Bel's downcast eyes lifted and bore into his half-lidded own.

She rushed to his side to silence him. "No, don't try to speak. Your throat will be torn from the charcoal." She lifted a glass of water to him, which he leaned in to welcome, before shuddering away in a gasp of fear.

"It's safe," she assured him, hand gripping the base of his skull. "It's safe."

"You've been unconscious for a day and a night," Lovino said. "You owe your life to her."

The whole room seemed to be stricken silent after that comment. Antonio's fingers were a few inches from hers, she noticed, and in his hand's weakly state it rolled in toward her. Any moment they might touch. She was afraid that if they did, she might recoil, not out of horror but just physical shock, the way an invisible bright bug sometimes leapt out of bundles of clean, sunny laundry and crackled on the tips of her fingers. She willed herself to attend to her employer and not to the achingly sweet turn of his shoulder, even when her hand slipped and settled there, at the swell just so into the cords of his neck.

The glass in her other hand was filled with a wilderness of tiny indecisive ripples. It looked nothing like the holy Water of Life, nor that of a baptismal. Her reflection peered up at her, a tiny changeling arrested in vacillations. "To whom you owe your life, sir, is not me, but the grace of God." she said at last, her voice barely a tremor.

Antonio breathed. "No," he replied. "Not God."

His hands closed over hers like a lesson in prayer. If her skin was a chapter of Psalms, it made it easier to touch, so long as touching was a kind of reading. It felt like there was enough space on her body to carry a whole Scripture, built in tender fingers and unblemished wrists.

Prayer was not a comfort but a cleanse; prayer was like this.

.

.

.


End file.
